by Júlia Genehr Santana
Marilena Chauí, a Brazilian philosopher, once said that “every person or group is a cultural subject” and that means that it is impossible to understand someone without understanding the culture this person identifies with. But sometimes, people don’t quite learn about this culture, instead, they learn only the stereotypes around it. This restricted view of culture, which is based on stereotypes, is what sometimes we can perceive when talking to foreigners on what they think about Brazil.
However, before we talk about how culture and stereotypes are related to each other, it is important to clarify the meaning of culture itself. I don’t believe that this is a simple task, but if I had to define culture in a few words, I would say that culture is everything produced and consumed by a person or a group; it is everything, it is every symbol, that these people consider meaningful and important ; it is how people identify themselves as a part of a group. In the meantime, we know that this concept of culture is not always considered when we are asked about other cultures, sometimes what we give as an answer is just some finished manufactured stereotypes, and as Chimamanda Adiche, a Nigerian writer, said “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”.
In this regard, we can think about how these stereotypes are related to Brazil’s image and to our own image “in the eyes of the other”. It is frustrating to say that unfortunately Brazil is still mentioned many times as a place where everybody is always happy and dancing, where we have no respect for commitments, where everywhere you can find beautiful landscapes and beaches. But the most shocking stereotypes we still hear are regarding Brazilian women.
On this particular issue, I would like to talk a little bit about a recent experience I had when interviewing students from PPE (Portuguese for Foreigners Program). In these interviews, my group and I asked the students a few questions about what they had learn about Brazilian women before coming to Brazil and what they still think about us. The most repeated answers were “Brazilian women are very beautiful”, “Brazilian women use less clothes”, Brazilian women are easier to date”.
By those answers, we could see that the stereotype of Brazilian women as beautiful, sexy and “easy” still remains. As the documentary directed by Lúcia Murat “The foreign eye” shows, Brazil is seen as a sex paradise to foreigners, and, by making movies that represent Brazil as a beach full of naked women ready to attack any foreign man, a lot of cinematographic productions helped to construct this representations. This repeated image reproduced on movies helps to reinforce those stereotypes of the Brazilian women we heard when talking to the PPE students, because as Chimamanda said “that is how to create a single story, show people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become”.
Thinking about these interviews, I also imagined how many stereotypes do we have of other cultures, how many awful things have we thought about people from other cultures because we only heard a part of their story? Before these interviews, for example, I thought that Chinese and Korean people were too serious and didn’t like our music, but getting to know them I have learned that they really enjoy our music, specially funk and “sertanejo”, and that they are not as serious as I thought they were. That only makes me think that we can no longer be satisfied with just one version of one single story, we have to really learn about other cultures and about what other people think about our own culture. We can no longer allow culture to be seen as just a stereotype, because we, Brazilian women ourselves, are an example of how these single stories can be prejudicial. The fight has to go on, until our story is no longer a single story.
Marilena Chauí, a Brazilian philosopher, once said that “every person or group is a cultural subject” and that means that it is impossible to understand someone without understanding the culture this person identifies with. But sometimes, people don’t quite learn about this culture, instead, they learn only the stereotypes around it. This restricted view of culture, which is based on stereotypes, is what sometimes we can perceive when talking to foreigners on what they think about Brazil.
However, before we talk about how culture and stereotypes are related to each other, it is important to clarify the meaning of culture itself. I don’t believe that this is a simple task, but if I had to define culture in a few words, I would say that culture is everything produced and consumed by a person or a group; it is everything, it is every symbol, that these people consider meaningful and important ; it is how people identify themselves as a part of a group. In the meantime, we know that this concept of culture is not always considered when we are asked about other cultures, sometimes what we give as an answer is just some finished manufactured stereotypes, and as Chimamanda Adiche, a Nigerian writer, said “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”.
In this regard, we can think about how these stereotypes are related to Brazil’s image and to our own image “in the eyes of the other”. It is frustrating to say that unfortunately Brazil is still mentioned many times as a place where everybody is always happy and dancing, where we have no respect for commitments, where everywhere you can find beautiful landscapes and beaches. But the most shocking stereotypes we still hear are regarding Brazilian women.
On this particular issue, I would like to talk a little bit about a recent experience I had when interviewing students from PPE (Portuguese for Foreigners Program). In these interviews, my group and I asked the students a few questions about what they had learn about Brazilian women before coming to Brazil and what they still think about us. The most repeated answers were “Brazilian women are very beautiful”, “Brazilian women use less clothes”, Brazilian women are easier to date”.
By those answers, we could see that the stereotype of Brazilian women as beautiful, sexy and “easy” still remains. As the documentary directed by Lúcia Murat “The foreign eye” shows, Brazil is seen as a sex paradise to foreigners, and, by making movies that represent Brazil as a beach full of naked women ready to attack any foreign man, a lot of cinematographic productions helped to construct this representations. This repeated image reproduced on movies helps to reinforce those stereotypes of the Brazilian women we heard when talking to the PPE students, because as Chimamanda said “that is how to create a single story, show people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become”.
Thinking about these interviews, I also imagined how many stereotypes do we have of other cultures, how many awful things have we thought about people from other cultures because we only heard a part of their story? Before these interviews, for example, I thought that Chinese and Korean people were too serious and didn’t like our music, but getting to know them I have learned that they really enjoy our music, specially funk and “sertanejo”, and that they are not as serious as I thought they were. That only makes me think that we can no longer be satisfied with just one version of one single story, we have to really learn about other cultures and about what other people think about our own culture. We can no longer allow culture to be seen as just a stereotype, because we, Brazilian women ourselves, are an example of how these single stories can be prejudicial. The fight has to go on, until our story is no longer a single story.